Frothingham looked at her with the expression of a thirsty man who is having a glass of cold water. “That’s what I think,” said he. “And I’m fond of horses.” A faint sneer in his satirical drawl made Catherine give him a furtive glance of anxiety--was the worm thinking of turning?
When they were in the box and the others were busy she said to him, in her tenderest tone: “You’re dreadfully bored by all this, aren’t you? And I thought it would give you pleasure for us to be together so much.”
[Illustration: “_As if we were a pair of new chimpanzees in a zoo_”]
The surliness cleared from his face somewhat. “No, I’m not bored. But I hate to be shown off. And, while you’ve been unconscious of it, the fact is that you and I have been sitting here in this cage five or six hours a day, gaped at as if we were a pair of new chimpanzees in a zoo.” As he remembered his wrongs, his anger rose upon the wine he had freely drunk at dinner. “It’s what I call low--downright rotten, Catherine,” he finished energetically.
“I wish you wouldn’t use that dreadful word,” she said, tears in her eyes, but a certain sting in her voice. “I know it’s all right in England--some of us use it here. But it--every time you or anyone says it I feel as if someone had thrust a horrid-smelling rag under my nose. You don’t mind my saying so, do you, dear?”
“Beg pardon,” he said. “We do use rowdy words nowadays. I’m so accustomed to it I don’t notice.”
Just then up to his ears from the promenade and the crowd gaping at the “new chimpanzees” came a voice: “They’re fighting--look! look! Hasn’t he got an ugly scowl? And she’s almost crying.”
He flushed scarlet and sent a glowering glance down into the crowd. He turned upon Catherine: “Just hear that! They think I’m rowing you. By--beg pardon, but--well--I sha’n’t endure it another instant.” And he rose, brushed past Catherine’s mother and Longview, Honoria and two men hanging over her, and stalked along the aisle down into and through the recognising crowd, and out of the Garden.
The boxes ate greedily of this sensation, and the crowd in the promenade scrambled frantically for the crumbs. It was presently noised round that the Englishman had become angered, had struck someone. Rumour at first said it was Catherine; but the crowd by the use of its legs and eyes, and the boxes by the use of their glasses, learned that this was false. There sat Catherine, calm, absorbed in the ring, applauding the jumpers, and turning now and then to her companions with outbursts of ladylike enthusiasm for some particularly clever performance. However, crowd and boxes saw that the Englishman was gone, felt that he must have gone in anger.